The Deliverer Has Come
An Asian American's Creative Retelling of the Story of Advent
By Dr. Sarah Shin, author of Beyond Colorblind (IVP, 2017) and The Deliverer Has Come (WaterBrook, 2024).
“Umma, she looks like me!”
My daughter, born of Korean-American parents who have raised her in Scotland for the past five of her six years of life, goes to an urban school that looks like it could be a little mini United Nations– a striking aberration in Scotland, which has a 95% white population. While she has received great intentional space to learn about different skin tones and hair and can describe her classmates’ appearances with surprising accuracy and without complicated feelings, what she does tell me makes my Asian American heart hurt a little: “no one looks like me.”
And it’s true. There are many African, South Asian, and Middle Eastern families, but there are so few East Asians in her school. My husband and I both know what it was like to have grown up in parts of the US where we were one of the few non-white kids at school. Here, though ethnic diversity surrounds her, my daughter is too aware that her eyes and her hair, her face, don’t look like all the others. We have had to figure out how we would tell her to be, sifting through the good of what our immigrant parents taught us, and what we as second-generation Korean Americans learned about claiming our ethnic identities in a racialized world. We have feelings like those our parents might have shared: will they, the other kids in the playground, be kind though she looks nothing like the others? Will she, living in the land that is the birthplace of unicorns and mermaids and smitten with the white-blond-haired Elsa and ginger-haired Anna dolls she begged for (reference: the Disney movie Frozen), always wish that her hair was gold or in braids like her African classmates?
Instead of choosing to duck our heads and stay low, we have chosen to try and help her stand tall. We try to get books and watch shows with women and girls who look like her, and we immerse her in a little Korean language school here. We visited her kindergarten classroom and taught about Korean and Korean-American things– including food, a book about Korean American grandchildren going on an adventure to find their halmoni (grandmother), soccer and olympic greats… we tried! Her classmates ate it up, and her confidence level about her being different from everyone else rose leaps and bounds. She might never see another person of East Asian descent in her classrooms while in Scotland, but we wanted to show her that she belonged–that she fit, that this is her home–at least once, by sharing who we are in front of her and her classmates. These are convictions and values we have carried over across an ocean after decades of learning how to embrace and own our Korean American stories. A mentor of mine once said, it is time for us not to define ourselves by our flaws and gaps, but by our gifts, by the good and strengths that our ethnic background and lived stories have to offer. I’ve tried to live and embody that for much of my adult life in the U.S., and now I wonder what can be retained and passed down in yet another context in the West.
Before we crossed the ocean for Scotland, I was often teaching and training at conferences and ministry leaders meetings in the US, whether it was MOPS or Alpha USA, campus ministry conferences or denominational training meetings. It was almost ten years ago, but I remember a young Asian-American woman coming up to me with tears hiding behind her eyes and saying, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen an Asian American woman serve as the main plenary speaker here before.” And my answer to her was, neither have I. But the doors had opened and I stepped through them.
My desire for my daughter to see herself, in her ethnic heritage, as part of the story of her neighborhood, intersects with my desire to see her grow up having a living breathing faith, and that the scriptures would come alive for her even now at a tender age. These are the values that drove my husband and me to write a book together.
My husband and I are both seminary trained; he’s an illustrator and I am a theologian. Christian children's books with lackluster pictures and limited content make us, well at the very least, discontent. When we decided to make a children’s book together, we wanted to write a book our daughter could see herself in– a book that would teach her, in an accessible manner, the beauty of the Advent story. A particular concern was that so many Christmas books, though they speak to the specific moments leading up to Jesus’ birth, don’t usually connect to the larger story of Israel’s waiting. They fail to remember the people of God waiting for deliverance from oppression just as they experienced freedom from bondage from Egypt many centuries before in the story of Exodus. We wanted her to understand that the coming of Emmanuel, of God with us, was good news– not just because God came in the flesh, but because that coming is part of the larger story of God delivering Abraham’s descendants, and the world at large, from sin and bondage. We wanted our book to use language and pictures that would connect with young readers. We wanted a book that she could give to her friends who might not know anything about the Christian story or the Bible. We wanted the story to come alive for her, and for that story to come alive for her friends.
So my husband decided to make our main character in the book, Anika, look similar to our daughter. Though we try to depict the other human characters in the story to Jesus’ ethnic background, Anika has bits of our daughter’s face: the same bangs/fringe framing her face with a look of curiosity that matches her own. The first time she saw a draft of Anika, she said, “she looks like me!”
What she may not know yet is that my husband has drawn in little Easter egg nuggets hailing our Korean heritage. One of our favorite spreads, the angels that fill the sky, depicts the angels as having different ethnic backgrounds. Angels are otherworldly creatures that create wonder and awe upon sight. They aren’t human, and yet in all depictions of angels, human artists have imagined them in the image of the people and imagination of their particular context. So, we continued that tradition, but in our 21st century modern context. Among the diversity of the angels depicted (for example, one of the angels is black with a modern flat-top, another looks white with brilliant ginger hair, another whose appearance has more of a Southwestern Native American feel), he drew one that had a traditional Korean dress with long hair, just like Korean women of old centuries before. I never said to my daughter that the angel is wearing a Korean dress. But when I asked her, “Which one is your favorite?”, she immediately pointed to that angel.
Another Easter egg of Korean heritage is that one of the wise men is dressed in the garments of a traveling Korean gentleman, with a light blue-green robe and black horsehair hat. His companions have complexions and clothes that hail from all other parts of the world. The nations are represented here in these men that came to worship the promised Messiah, the Deliverer. Not only would our daughter see herself in this story, but perhaps so many of her friends, who hail from different ethnic backgrounds, could also see themselves in the images and the story.
I am a Korean American woman who has benefited deeply from pastors and ministry leaders who paved the way for me to thrive as a minister and as a theologian. These included Asian American women and men who modeled, encouraged, and supported me as a young leader– and also black, white, Latino/a ministers who did the same. They all made space to make sure that I saw myself as part of the story, as a full participant in the work that God was doing in church, in the ministry work in which we co-labored together. I see this book as a way of showing my daughter the same: that this story, more than 2,000 years old, is a living, breathing story which she is invited into as a full participant. A New Testament professor of mine remarked candidly in class, if you can’t explain it to an eight-year-old, you don’t understand it yet. I’m hoping that this book helps her understand the story of Jesus coming as a baby to a broken and hurting world, in a way that is more than just a Christmas moment filled with tinsel, fairy lights, and presents under a tree. Reactions from both children and grownups have ranged from young, curious wonder at the pictures to unexpected tears that come to adults as they read. I’m seeing that this book is helping explain and reflect anew on the hope offered in the story of God coming to be with us on earth.
I hope that my daughter and the book’s young readers understand the Christmas story not only as the coming of God to be with us, but also as part of the larger promise of God delivering his people from bondage and sin. I hope that this big view of the story of Jesus would be one she can hold onto as she inevitably will encounter injustice, evil, and pain. God is not done with his story, with our story– but this pivotal moment, of the Deliverer coming in the flesh to be with us and to deliver us from sin and evil, is one that I hope will anchor her trust in the Lord as she grows in faith and stature. The book is dedicated to her with this hope: “May you always get to share this story.”
Dr. Sarah Shin recently received her PhD in Systematic Theology from the University of Aberdeen. She is the author of Beyond Colorblind (IVP, 2017) and has taught lectures at Westminster Theology Centre (UK) and Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary (US). She lives in Aberdeen, Scotland with her husband (the illustrator of The Deliverer Has Come) and their daughter. Their social media handles can be found at @sarahshinauthor and @shinhappens.